How Tolerance Makes Nations Vulnerable

What Sweden is experiencing this summer, following a series of Koran-burning protests, is the stuff of nightmares for any liberal democracy. Ideologically-driven individuals and foreign regimes are exploiting Sweden’s societal tolerance against itself. Other nations seeking to learn from this misfortune could do much worse than to start reading the philosophy of Karl Popper.

The disinformation surrounding Koran burnings in Sweden bear out philosopher Karl Popper’s warnings
A society believing so strongly in tolerance that it’s unwilling to defend tolerance against the onslaught of the intolerant risks destroying tolerance itself, Popper argued in The Open Society and its Enemies. When the Austrian-born philosopher wrote his most famous treatise during the second world war, he couldn’t have known the scale of the intolerance that decades later would befall western countries. He certainly could not have predicted the battle now taking place between a symbiotic alliance of a few attention-seeking Koran-burners in Scandinavia and a group of regimes and individuals itching for a fight with the west on one hand, and tolerant Sweden on the other.

Late last month, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation convened, at the behest of Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, to condemn three recent Koran burnings in Sweden and Denmark. The IOC “deplores the recurrence of acts of desecration of al-Mus’haf ashSharif [the Koran], and deeply regrets the continued issuance by the authorities of a permit allowing that action to occur” the leaders’ final communique declared.

Read the full article at Financial Times